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Ash Rose
One of the residents of Vault 76, Ash Rose emerged from the Vault on Reclamation day to fulfill the Vault’s mission of rebuilding America. Instead, confronted with a strange and frightening new world, she became something of a recluse, living by herself off the wreckage of a fallen civilization. History Jacob Thorne and Leticia Rose were two of those selected for Vault 76. Both were leaders in their fields; Jacob was a sociologist with considerable expertise in planning, population management and group behaviours, while Leticia was a redound biochemist who had performed extensive research into disease control and the treatment of rapidly mutating infections. The pair of them had met during the launch of the program, and had already developed something of an attraction based on mutual interest in each other’s work and how it could be applied should Vault 76 ever be needed for its intended mission. Those ideas would be put into practice on the morning of October 23rd, 2077, with the eruption of the Great War. Both Thorne and Rose were evacuated to the Vault, taking their places inside it along with the other Residents before it was sealed. They both quickly adapted to their new lives underground, knowing full well that the future of America, and perhaps all of humanity, depended on them and their fellow Vault Dwellers. Perhaps inevitably their attraction grew into something deeper, with the pair of them forming a romantic relationship like so many other couples within the Vault. One thing led to another, and soon Leticia was pregnant with their child. Ashely Rose (named for Jacob’s father) was born on April 25, 2079, joining the small but quickly growing pool of “vault babies” who would grow up in this new world. She was joined in February of 2080 by her younger brother, Jeremiah Thorn. In many ways, Vault 76 was an ideal environment for a child. Entirely safe and self-contained, it was protected from all the hazards of the outside world. Raised by a cadre of dedicated child-minders (recruited both for this role and for their value in rebuilding society afterwards), well-educated, having healthy diets and a supportive community, the children of the Vault wanted for nothing save for the sky and the outside world. And yet, for all that, Ash (as she preferred to be known) struggled for much of her childhood. As she grew, Ash became ever increasingly uncomfortable around the communal circle of the Vault’s extended family. She had problems with interacting with them, and found joining groups to be a sometimes difficult and often daunting task. It wasn’t that she disliked them by any means; more that she simply was uncomfortable around them as a whole and preferred solitude. This was obviously a problem in the very communal Vault, which resulted in Ash spending a lot of her time simply grinning and trying to fake enjoyment and engagement. The situation was not helped by her brother. In many ways, Jerimiah was her opposite. Outgoing, gregarious and very open, he seemed to relish engaging with others and becoming a part of the group. He was as much at home with others as she preferred solitude, something that caused a rift between the pair of them. While their parents loved them both equally, Ash couldn’t help but feel that she was often living in Jerimiah’s shadow. Reaching adulthood bought some degree of relief to Ash’s stresses. Her GOAT results suggested an aptitude for engineering and mechanics, which saw her apprenticed to the Vault’s engineering department. Loosing herself in the depths of the Vault proved to be Ash’s haven, as she could surround herself with machinery and lose herself in a task, effectively cutting herself off from human interaction. It helped a lot that her supervisor, Kyle Mainglov, was rather relaxed man who was more than happy to give her the space that she needed. For a few years, she quietly thrived as she became a full-time member of the engineering staff, growing to know the Vault better than her peers. The dawn of the new century also bought with it change. While Vault 76 had been designed for a twenty-five year stay, it became clear to Ash that it was nearing the end of it’s lifespan. Equipment failures were becoming more and more common, and while the Vault was far from being at risk, it also became obvious that they would not be able to stay there forever. The signs became more obvious as new educational programs began, focusing on outdoor living, survival and all manner of hazards that those born in the Vault had never considered; sunstroke, exposure, diseases, wildlife and so on. Finally the Overseer made the announcement that many had been expecting for a quarter of a century; Reclamation Day was coming. For Ash, this was a time of mixed emotions. To her, the Vault’s depths had become a safe haven, a place where she could hide and escape the pressures of others. Conversely, there was a certain thrill of the unknown, to seeing new places and new experiences that had been alien to her. The idea of a world outside the Vault was strangely enticing, something that was able to bring Ash out of her shell. Like the rest of Vault 76’s population, Ash began making plans for Reclamation Day. She knew that venturing out on her own would be dangerous, and so she came to an agreement with Jerimiah. The pair of them would venture out together, with Ash’s engineering skills complimenting his own social ones in engaging with those they found outside and then beginning the process of reconstructing America once they figured out what needed to be done. What actually happened was very different. Jerimiah chose to abandon her at the last minute and instead headed out of the Vault with a group of his friends. After being left standing for some time (and some gentle prodding from the Mister Handy staff) Ash was forced to leave the Vault on her own, stepping out into a strange new world. As she had expected, what she found was different and confronting, but even then she wasn’t ready for just how different it would be. It was one thing to see the wide expanse of the great outdoors, looking out over Appalachia into a world far more vast than she could have ever imagined. However, it was the other sights that greeted her that proved to be more profound in shaping her future. There was a dead body not too far form the Vault. While all their training had lead them to expect that such was inevitable, it was still confronting to see one right there. Vault 76’s populace had lasted twenty-five years without a single fatality, so seeing a corpse right off the bat was jarring to say the least. Conversely, it told Ash that people had survived the Great War, and opened the possibility that there may be others out there. Her actual first encounter with living people proved to be another matter. Those that she came across, dwelling in a farm not too far from the Vault, were horribly mutated. While still intelligent (they were capable of speaking and using firearms) they had burned red skin punctuated with unearthly green growths, giving them a horrific appearance. Furthermore, they were immediately hostile without question. Ash was forced to shoot several of them before beating a retreat, an act that left her shaken. Her next encounter was even more jarring. Vault-Tec had given the nearby town of Flatwoods very poor odds of surviving the war, and yet it was still standing, albeit somewhat worn. However, its inhabitants were all dead, apparently slaughtered by another group of survivors who had attacked them. However, what had happened was so sudden and violent that the bodies of both groups had simply been left where they fell. Furthermore, this had happened nearly five years ago, with nobody having come through the town since. While Ash continued to travel, a growing sense of doom began to fall over her. So far she had found no trace of living people. Everybody had either died years ago or been horribly mutated into new and hostile forms. And while she had found evidence that there had been people living in the region for some tome after the Great War, as one the logs and notes she’d located came to an abrupt end in the last months of 2096. It seemed that the last humans in Appalachia had either been wiped out by some external force, or simply killed each other. It was two discoveries, very different in scale, that finally pushed her over the edge. The first was entering the regional capitol of Charlestown. While she had expected to find it in ruins, the level of devastation was far greater than she had seen so far, with the city essentially destroyed through what appeared to have been a catastrophic flood. While she initially thought this was caused by the Great War, she was appalled when she learned the truth. The city had been destroyed by a group of human survivors for no reason at all beyond extracting a measure of vengeance. The whole thing struck her as being redicously petty and wasteful of them, especially given how tenuous life in the post-war world must have been. The second was the discovery of the body of a dead Vault Dweller. Up until that point, Ash had held out hope that the other Vaults in the Appalachian region had survived and that their populations would be out there doing their best to rebuild. While in no way definitive, this one corpse shook her to the core, shattering that hope to pieces. Driven to irrationality by her fears, she reached the conclusion that everyone in Appalachia, if not the rest of the world, was dead and that her fellow Residents were the last humans alive. And, to her mind, it seemed like only a matter of time before they also succumbed. At that point, Ash quietly snapped. She abandoned her mission, feeling that any effort at rebuilding was futile and at best simply prolonging the inevitable. Instead she fled into the mountains, doing her best to isolate herself from any of her fellow Residents in the hope of living out her days in peaceful seclusion. Using her CAMP, she built herself a shelter in a remote corner, using her skills to survive with whatever she could build from the ruins of a fallen civilisation. If not for her Pip-Boy, Ash would have completely lost track of time in the mountains. For several months, life passed with little contact from others. While a few Residents passed her location, none came near her CAMP. Instead, she had the occasional contact with roaming Super Mutants or Scorched whom she simply drove off or dispatched. She did continue to explore Appalachia, however, but shied away from the ruined towns, wary of what or who she might find. For the most part, she was content to live her life in solitude. She kept a sporadic journal and made illustrations of some of her findings, but for the most part Ash just wanted to avoid the world. Internally she had told herself that it was only a matter of time before the other Residents died, and that she was better off simply not knowing about it. With enough clean water and passable food to be comfortable, and a stash of RadAway for emergencies, she figured that she could live out the rest of her life without ever seeing another person. For all her planning, her life of solitude only lasted a few months. Another Resident accidentally stumbled into her CAMP while exploring. Ash immediately tried to drive them out, only to be recognised by the intruder; furthermore, the recognition was mutual. Alicia Morgan was another Vault Baby who had grown up alongside Ash, with the pair of them being friends, albeit not close ones. A bigger surprise came when she was introduced to one of Alicia’s travelling companions, Kyle Mainglov. Her mentor had adapted well to life in the Wastelands; save for losing a few pounds, he seemed to have been unchanged and was definitely coping better than she was. The pair of them, along Rita Conn, the third member of their team, invited Ash to join them. She only half-accepted, being somewhat dragged along by Alicia while making excuses. What she instead found was that Kyle had set up a remarkably cosy and warm CAMP which, while obviously no Vault, still ha a lot of the amenities that Ash had believed no longer existed (and had been quietly denying herself), making for as close to a comfortable life as they could manage. On top of that, she found that the trio were remarkably accepting. Kyle allready knew her and was more than happy to give her the space that she needed to collect herself and adjust however she wanted. Rita Conn had been through her own post-Vault breakdown (for many of the same reasons) and was very sympathetic towards Ash, willing to lend an ear to her issues. However, Ash found the strongest connection with Alicia. Besides being more or less the same age and having lived their whole lives inside the vault, the pair had both had difficulties in adjusting to life on the outside. Talking with Alicia helped Ash with her social anxiety and depression, while Ash in turn helped Alicia with her often crippling agoraphobia. At first Ash was simply a “prolonged guest” with Kyle’s team; she would come and go as she wanted, and would often spend days at a time holed up in her own mountaintop CAMP. However, over the next two months, she came to spend more and more time at Kyle’s CAMP with the others, realising that she really did enjoy their company. The idea of a group who had no social pressures, no need to conform and a relaxed attitude to most everything appealed to her, which eventually saw her join their team full-time. Much of April and May of 2103 was spent exploring together as the quartet continued to discover more about their world. In many cases, they were following up on things one or the other of them had discovered on their own, and now could explore more thoroughly with the aid of their new partners. Ash especially found herself caught up in Alicia’s efforts to catalogue the Vaults of the Appalachian region, quietly hopeful that one or more of them may still be functional and have living people inside of them. One of their exploratory missions turned into something of an adventure for the quartet. Ash had found a Holotape belonging to a Raider boss who had promised a substantial reward for whoever got him out of Appalachia. While they assumed he was dead, Scorched or possibly both, the quartet chose to follow the lead and find this supposed stash. The result was something of a rambling course across Appalachia as they followed a series of breadcrumbs, ending in the town of Monogah. What they found was that the Raider leader, Draven Jett, had succumbed to the Scorched Plague. However, he also still had enough sense of self to have been drawn back to the place where he hid his stash, and to be ready to defend it. The result was that the four of them walked into an ambush by Jett and his “gang” of Scorched followers. Quick thinking saved their lives at first, turning the attack into a protracted gunfight as the quartet tried to deal with the Scorched onslaught. Eventually Ash was able to kill Jett, which in turn weakened the other Scorched that he was controlling. That was the break that the group needed to turn the battle around, managing to defeat the last of their opponents. Having collected the key from Draven’s body (along with a holotape of his last words as a human) they secured the stash, dividing its contents between the four of them. For Ash, the whole experience was strangely enjoyable, simply because it was something she had accomplished with others, engaging with them rather than hiding form them inside her own fears. Personality Outwardly, Ash Rose is somewhat standoffish. She is often a woman of few words, speaking only as needed and not letting her emotions show. She prefers blunt and direct engagements with strangers, and doesn't feel a need to offer explanations or any more details than is needed. She prefers solitude, and likes those spots that are isolated and away from the rest of the world and especially other people. The truth is a lot more complicated. Ash has allways suffered from deep-seated social anxiety, something that was an anathema to the communal-minded population of Vault 76. While she preferred silence and isolation, finding such things were often impossible inside the Vault, especially when living in the shadow of her outgoing, charismatic older brother. Leaving the Vault in many ways freed her from those responsibilities, allowing her to flee from the rest of the world and hide in her own solitude. On top of this, Ash is also prone to catastrophizing and seeing the worst in a given situation. Her initial contacts with life in Appalachia, with the combination of Scorched, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants and the dead bodies of the humans who had survived the war, left her with a deep-seated fear that she and the other Vault 76 residents were, in fact, the last people left in the world. This in turn fuelled her isolationism as she figured that they were all doomed anyway, and thus there was no point in engaging with anyone. Travelling with Kyle Mainglov and his team has helped soften her attitudes and allowed her to somewhat readjust to normal life. She has become a lot more open, but she still has a lot of problems with expressing herself. Spending time with Alicia, who has been dealing with her own issues and phobias after leaving the Vault has helped calm her and ground her to a degree, with the pair of them opening up to each other about their concerns. That Alicia has managed to remain optimistic despite all she has seen has served as no small inspiration to Ash. Appearance Despite her months living alone in the mountains, Ash Rose still retains some degree of the fresh-faced Vault Dweller that emerged on Reclamation Day. She is fit and trim, a result of both Vault living and the harsh realities of life in post-war Appalachia. Not only did she have to stay fit and active with a daily routine of hiking, mountain climbing, exploring and often fighting (or at least running from) dangerous creatures and other hazards. Ash has retained her fair skin, which is decorated with a smattering of freckles across her cheeks, and is now adorned with several small scars from her life in the wastelands. She has light blue eyes, and a scruffy mop of ginger hair. Previously worn shoulder-length in something of an unruly mess, Ash shaved off part of it during her self-imposed exile; at present it is growing back out after she began to feel more than a little self-conscious about it. She also took to wearing facepaint out of some self-declared rejection of society while emulating the now-dead raiders of the region. Equipment Like the other Residents of Vault 76, Ash Rose left the Vault with a Vault Suit, a Pip-Boy 2000 Mk IV and a CAMP. These three elements have remained with her throughout her wanderings, and have served her well. Out of practicality, she took to wearing combat armour over her Vault Suit, a decision that saved her life on multiple occasions. She is usually armed with a Handmade assault rifle, taken from a raider camp, which has served her well in dealing with wasteland hazards. Fore some time, Ash used a salvaged Raider Power Armor for those occasions when she needed more protection and strength than what just her own armour could offer. After joining up with Kyle Mainglov, he offered to help locate and recondition a ‘real’ Power Armour for her use. Category:Vault Dwellers Category:Appalachia